Tocqueville '' Political Science, To The Academy'' [ 1852]

Chapter 1

Speech Given to the Annual Public
Meeting of the Academy of Moral and
Political Sciences on April 3,1852'

Alexis de Tocqueville, President of the Academy

Gentlemen,

The academy in whose name I have the honor of speaking today has been
exposed from birth to strange judgments; her very reason for being has been
contested. It is willingly admitted that the actions of the private man ought to be
subject to a permanent rule, and that morality is a science. But is it the same for
those collections of men one calls societies? Is there a science of politics? It has
hitherto been denied, and, oddly enough, it has generally been political men, that
is to say, the very ones who ought naturally to practice this science, who have
taken such liberties with it. They have sometimes permitted themselves to call it
chimerical or at least vain.

There is something rather puerile, they have said, in imagining that there is
a particular art that teaches one to govern. The field of politics is too varied and
volatile to permit one to place there the foundations of a science. The facts 2 that
would constitute its matter never have anything but a false and deceptive resem¬
blance to one another. The epoch in which they take place, the condition of the
peoples in which one observes them, the character of the men who produce them
or who submit to them renders them so profoundly dissimilar that it can only be
useful to consider each of them separately. The prince who tried to govern his
people with the aid of theories and maxims formed 3 while studying philosophy
and history would turn out very poorly; it is to be believed that simple good
sense would have been of greater use to him.

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Alexis de Tocqueville

Such is the rather condescending language I have sometimes heard used by
political men regarding the sciences whose subject is politics and regarding
those who cultivate them.

I have always found them to be greatly in the wrong. 4

There are two parts of politics that must not be confused, one fixed and the
other in motion.

The first, founded on the very nature of man, on his interests, on his facul¬
ties, on his needs as revealed by philosophy and history, on his instincts, which
change their objects according to the times without changing their nature, and
which are as immortal as his race; the first, I say, teaches us what laws are best
adapted to the general and permanent condition of humanity.

All this is the science.

And then there is a practical and militant politics that struggles against the
difficulties of each day, adapting to the variety of incidents, providing for the
passing needs of the moment, and calling to its aid the ephemeral passions of
contemporaries.

This is the art of government.

The art assuredly differs from the science, practice is often removed from
theory, I do not deny it; I would go even farther, if desired, and make this con¬
cession, admitting that, in my judgment, to excel at one is no reason at all to
succeed in the other. I do not know, gentlemen, whether, in a country that has
counted among its great publicists and its great writers so many eminent states¬
men, it is even permitted to say that to make fine books, even on politics or
things connected to it, prepares one quite poorly for the government of men and
the management of affairs. I permit myself, however, to believe and to think that
these eminent writers who showed themselves to be at the same time statesmen
have shone in affairs not because they were illustrious authors, but despite being
so.

Indeed, the art of writing suggests, to those who have practiced it for a long
time, habits of mind hardly favorable to the conduct of affairs. It enslaves them
to the logic of ideas, when the crowd never obeys any logic save that of the pas¬
sions. It gives them the taste for the fine, the delicate, the ingenious, the original,
when it is coarse commonplaces that lead the world.

Even the study of history, which often enlightens the field of present facts,
sometimes obscures it. How many men would one not encounter among us who,
with minds surrounded by a learned darkness, saw 1640 in 1789 and 1688 in
1830, 5 and, always behind by one revolution, wanted to apply to the second the
remedy for the first, like those medical doctors who, completely up to date on
previous maladies of the human body, but always ignorant of the particular and
new ill from which their patient suffers, hardly fail to kill him with erudition! I
have sometimes heard it regretted that Montesquieu lived in a time when he
could not experiment with the politics whose science he advanced so much. .1
have always found much indiscretion in these regrets; perhaps the rather subtle
finesse of his mind would often have made him miss in practice precisely that
point by which the success of affairs is decided; he might well have been able to

Speech Given to the Academy

19

succeed at becoming the rarest of publicists, while being a rather poor minister,
a thing that is very common.

We recognize therefore, gentlemen, that political science and the art of go¬
verning are two very distinct things. But docs it follow that political science
docs not exist or that it is vain?

If I seek for what prevents certain minds from perceiving this science, I find
that it is its very grandeur. The science that treats of the conduct of societies
covers, indeed, an immense space extending from philosophy to the elementary
studies of civil justice. Being almost without limits, it forms but a single object
to the view. One confuses it with all the knowledge connected directly or indi¬
rectly to man. and in this immensity one loses sight of it.

But when wc apply ourselves to the attentive consideration of this great
science, when we remove whatever touches it without adhering to it, then the
diverse parts that really compose it appear, and we finish by forming (seJaire) a
clear idea of the whole. Wc then sec that this science descends by degrees from
the general to the particular, and from pure theory to written laws and to facts.

For those who consider it in this way, the authors who arc famous for culti¬
vating it cease to form a confused crowd; they are divided into very distinct
groups each of which can be examined separately. Some, with the aid of detailed
accounts of history, or the abstract study of man, seek out the natural rights be¬
longing to the body social and the rights exercised by the individual, what laws
best fit societies according to the forms these have received from birth or
adopted, and what systems of government arc applicable according to the case,
the place, the time. These are the publicists: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli. Mon¬
tesquieu, Rousseau, to cite but a few brilliant names.

Others attempt the same labor with respect to that society of nations of
which each people is a citizen, a society that is always rather barbarous, even in
the most civilized centuries, whatever effort is made to soften and regulate the
relations of those who compose it. They discover and indicate what international
law is, beyond particular treaties. This is the work of Grotius and Pufendorf.

Others still, while preserving the general and theoretical character of politi¬
cal science, confine themselves to a single part of the vast subject they embrace:
this is Beccaria establishing what die rules of criminal justice ought to be among
all peoples; this is Adam Smith attempting to find the foundation of the wealth
of nations.

Thus we arrive, always constricting our sphere, at the jurists and great
commentators: Cujas, Domal, Pothicr, and all those who interpret and clarify
existing institutions, treaties, constitutions, and laws.

To the extent that we have descended from ideas to facts, the field of politi¬
cal science narrows and becomes firmer; but it is always the same science. One
can be convinced of this if one compares all the authors who occupied them¬
selves with the different matters we have just indicated, and if one remarks that,
however far they seem to be from one another, they nonetheless lend one anoth¬
er a hand and aid one another constantly. There is not a commentator who has

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Alexis de Tocqueville

nol often supported himself on the abstract and general truths that the publicists
have found, and the latter constantly need to found their theory on the particular
facts and the institutions of our experience that the commentators have revealed
or described.

But I am astonished, gentlemen, to have to demonstrate the existence of the
political sciences in a country where their power shines forth in every direction.
You deny the political sciences and what they arc capable of doing? Look
around you: see these monuments, see these mins! Who raised the former, who
made (a fait) the latter? Who has changed the face of the world of our day to the
point that, if your grandfather could be bom again, he would recognize neither
the laws, nor the mores, nor the ideas, nor the customs, nor the usages that he
knew; and hardly the language that he spoke? Who, in a word, has produced this
French Revolution, the greatest event in history? I say the greatest and not the
most useful, lor this revolution still endures, and I await its last effect in order to
characterize it with such a word; but finally, who has produced it? Was it the
political men of the eighteenth century, the princes, the ministers, the great
lords? We need neither bless nor curse them; we must instead pity them, for they
have almost always done other than they wanted to do, and finished by achiev¬
ing a result they detested. The great artisans of this fearsome revolution were
precisely the only men of those limes who had never taken the least part in pub¬
lic affairs. It was authors of whom no one is ignorant, it was the most abstract
science that deposited in the spirit of our fathers those seeds of novelties from
which sprouted suddenly so many political institutions and civil laws unknown
to their ancestors.

And note that whatever the political sciences have done here with such irre¬
sistible power and such marvelous brilliance, they do everywhere and always,
though more secretly and slowly; among all civilized peoples, the political
sciences give birth to, or at least form 6 , those general ideas from which then
emerge the particular facts in whose midst men of politics busy themselves, and
the laws they believe they invent; these ideas form around each society some¬
thing like a sort of intellectual atmosphere breathed by the spirit of both go¬
verned and governors, and from which the former as well as the latter draw,
often without knowing it, sometimes without wanting it, the principles of their
conduct. Barbarians arc the only ones who recognize in politics nothing but
practice.

Our Academy, gentlemen, has for her mission the furnishing to these
sciences, so necessary and so fearsome, of a hearth and a rule. 7 She ought to
cultivate them in full liberty, but never to depart from them, reminding herself
always that she is a learned society, and not a political body. The dignity of her
labors depends on it.

This is anyhow what she has always done, and one asks nothing of her now
but that she remain in agreement with herself. Always the Academy has taken
care to hold herself at a distance from parties, in that serene region of pure
theory and abstract science. Not only has she enclosed herself there, but she has
made a constant effort to attract and retain there those spirits whom the passions

Speech Given to the Academy

21

of the moment and the clamor of affairs would constantly have distracted. The
subjects she has proposed for her contests attest to this, and the contest itself that
we are going to judge today succeeds in proving it.

The first question she proposed was this: “Compare the moral and political
philosophy of Plato and Aristotle with the doctrines of the greatest modern phi¬
losophers on the same matters. Appraise what is temporary and false, and what
is true and immortal in these different systems.”

The path thus opened is immense; it contains almost the entire history of the
moral and political sciences; now, of all the sciences, it is these with which the
human spirit is most immediately and most constantly occupied. A study so old
and so sustained must have produced an almost infinite number of different no¬
tions and diverse systems. To summarize this immense labor of the intelligence
and to judge it seems a work that not only surpasses the limits of an article, but
also those of a book. Indeed, the enterprise is difficult; yet it is not impractica¬
ble.

There is this great difference, among many others, between the physical
sciences and the moral sciences: that the field of the first is almost without
boundaries, since it has no boundaries save those of nature, while the latter
sciences are contained within the study of a single subject, man; and as much as
this unique object changes a great deal in aspect according to the individual and
the times, and while the half-darkness that always surrounds it also lends itself
to all sorts of illusions and errors, nonetheless the number of mother-ideas these
sciences have produced is not as great as one might think, considering all those
who have been occupied with them.

It is incredible how often moral and political systems have been successive¬
ly found, forgotten, found again, forgotten once more only to reappear a little
later, always charming or surprising the world as if they were new, attesting to
the ignorance of men, and not to the fecundity of the human spirit.

Perhaps it is permissible to apply to the moral and political sciences what
Mme de Sevigne said so agreeably of love, that “// est un grand recommen¬
ces .” 8 Indeed, it often happens that they repeat what they had already said in
another manner. They offer a small number of truths that are not very old, and
few errors that do not appear decrepit if one knows the date of their birth. Thus
these makers of social theories whom we see in our day, and who seem to us,
with reason, to be so dangerous, would appear all the more boring had we more
erudition and more memory.

It is therefore possible, in studying the most illustrious authors that have
treated of the moral and political sciences in different centuries, to find out what
are in these matters the principal ideas that have had currency among human¬
kind, to reduce them into a rather small number of systems, and then to compare
them to each other and judge them. In any case, the difficulty of this task ap¬
pears to have frightened the spirit of the contestants. One alone has presented
himself: his work has attracted the serious attention of the Academy, and merits
it; nonetheless he has not been able to induce her to award the prize this year.

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Alexis de Tocqueville

She hopes that new contestants will present themselves, and above all that the
author of the only article that has been entrusted to her can himself perfect the
already remarkable work he has submitted. She therefore remits the question to
the competition of 1853. All those who cultivate these noble studies whose ob¬
ject is man and society shall doubtlessly think, the Academy hopes, that if there
are few subjects as difficult to treat as that which she has proposed, there is none
more grand and more beautiful.

The section on legislation has likewise posed this question: “What are, from
the juridical and philosophic points of view, the reforms to which our civil pro¬
cedure is open?”

You see here, gentlemen, that the horizon is contracting. This latter subject
is as particular as the former was general. It is concerned not with the man, but
with the litigant.

Procedure, we must recall, is not in high honor with the public; we often
permit ourselves to confuse it with chicanery. It would be better nonetheless
were it revered, and we are wrong to judge it by the abuses made of it; for with¬
out procedure the judge and the litigant act without rule in all that precedes and
follows judgment, and the domain of law remains, in the best case, an empire of
the arbitrary. Now, arbitrary justice is the very stamp of barbarism; thus civi¬
lized peoples have always attached a great importance to the rules of procedure.

Free peoples, above all, have always been great proceduralists; they have
drawn in good part from forms for the defense of their liberty, and one has seen
them oppose power more advantageously with the thousand little formalities
procedure furnishes than with the general rights guaranteed by the constitution,
just as it often happens that neighbors of the sea succeed better at preventing its
ravages by sowing reeds upon its banks, with whose aid they divide and slow
down its surges, than by raising high dikes to contain it. This part of the laws, so
important, has nonetheless remained the most imperfect.

Those innovators who, for the last sixty years, have transformed everything
in France, have, despite their longings, hardly modified the laws relative to the
administration of civil justice. Napoleon himself ran aground here. All efforts
combined have ended only by changing the position, but not the nature, of the
laws. We have done nothing with the ordinances of our ancient kings but trans¬
port them into our codes. Thus I have always thought it a slight exaggeration to
say that among us nothing is free from revolutions, since civil procedure has
been; it is to be believed that it will retain this rare privilege until some great
writer does for it what Filangieri and Beccaria did for criminal procedure, draw¬
ing it from the dust and the obscurity of the studies and the court offices, expos¬
ing it to the light of day, and succeeding at removing it from the prejudiced in¬
terests of practice and submitting it to the general notions of philosophy and
good sense.

This is what the Academy has tried to do in posing the questions indicated,
and ten contestants have responded to her appeal.

Three articles have merited her praise; the goal has been approached, but it
has not yet been reached, and the Academy judges, by the articles that have been

Speech Given to the Academy

23

transmitted to her, by the importance of the subject, and by the hope that one
must conceive of the utility of the labors she has provoked, that it is best to remit
the question to the contest of 1853.

Three prizes were proposed for this year. The Academy regrets that she
must refuse the first two. She is pleased to be able to award the third.

This prize has been obtained by M. Bodin, doctor of law, advocate for the
Paris Court of Appeal. The question that prompted M. Bodin’s article, or rather
his book—for the work of which we will speak has the extent and the merit of a
great treatise on its subject—was this: “Seek the origin of judicial order 9 in
France, tracing its history and shedding light upon the principles of its current
organization.”

All peoples, gentlemen, ought to be interested in the history and the consti¬
tution of justice; for the judicial power is possibly, all things considered, the one
with the most influence on the daily conditions of each citizen.

But do we not have, as Frenchmen, particular reasons to inquire into what
justice has been among us? When I seek for the two classes of men who have
most contributed to forming the traits of our national character, I find that they
are writers and magistrates.

The first have given to the French spirit that temperament at once vigorous
and delicate that we see in ourselves, that nature so curious, audacious, restive,
often factious and always intractable, which acts incessantly in Europe and in
our own midst. The second have bequeathed to us judicial mores, a certain re¬
spect for individual independence, and a persevering taste for forms and judicial
guarantees, which we follow even in the midst of the disorders of revolutions
and the indifference that succeeds them.

To make a history of literature and justice in France is to seek the origins of
ourselves.

M. Bodin has acquitted himself very remarkably of this task in all that con¬
cerns justice. He traces for us the vicissitudes of judicial order in France from
the Romans to our day. The details, perhaps a bit numerous, which fill this vast
tableau, do not in any case impede us from grasping the ensemble, and the gen¬
eral view here is imposing. The historical part of this article is therefore very
worthy of our praise. The philosophical portion of the work is not equal to the
other and harms it slightly. It is much easier indeed to describe well than to
judge well. The Academy would also have liked to find more brilliance in the
thought and more color in the style. It seems that the author is a better draftsman
than grand painter. But his work remains nonetheless a noble (beau) one that
gives honor as much to the one who produced it as to the learned body that in¬
spired it.

After having judged the articles that competed in 1851, the Academy has
had to occupy herself with choosing new subjects. Two are indicated by her this
year. The first has been furnished by the section on philosophy: it concerns one
of the most mysterious phenomena that can be presented by this being so full of
mysteries that one calls man.

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Alexis de Tocqueville

What is sleep? What essential difference is there between dreaming and think¬
ing? Does artificial sleepwalking, which so to speak is nothing but the perfec¬
tion or utilization of dreaming, exist? What is this singular state during which
several faculties of the human spirit seem rather enlarged than restrained, save
the first of them all: the will, which here remains blind or subordinated? Can
one account for these phenomena according to the rules of a sound philosophi¬
cal method?

The second question posed this year interests at once the family and society.
The Academy asks us to examine from a moral and economic point of view the
best regime to which marriage contracts can be submitted.

You know, gentlemen, that M. le Baron Felix de Beaujour has established a
quinquennial prize for the author of the best book on the relief of poverty.

The book that the Academy demands of contestants this year is a manual of
morals and political economy for the use of the working classes.

All times have seen laborers and the poor; but what seems peculiar to our
own is the opinion, so widespread in our day, that there exists somewhere a re¬
medy for this hereditary and incurable sickness of poverty and labor, and that
with a little good will governors might easily succeed at discovering it. We are
prepared to accord to each power that is born a reasonable time to find and apply
this new medicine, and, if it fails, we are ever ready to chase this practitioner out
and call upon another doctor. Experiments follow and generations succeed one
another without this error dissipating, and we have come to believe that the same
chimera will always traverse the same ruins.

The Academy, in posing the question I am going to announce, has had for
her end the combating of this false idea from which evils flow. She desires, to
this effect, that the contestants apply themselves to spreading among the work¬
ing classes to whom they address themselves some of the most elementary and
certain notions of political economy; that they make it well understood, for ex¬
ample, that there is something permanent and necessary in the economic laws
that govern the rates of wages; why these laws, being in some sense of divine
right, since they emerge from the nature of man and the very structure of socie¬
ty, are placed beyond the reach of revolutions; and that the government cannot
make wages rise when the demand for labor diminishes, just as no one can pre¬
vent water from spilling over the rim of a leaning glass.

But what the Academy desires above all is that the different authors she
provokes set in light this truth: that the principle remedy of poverty is found in
the poor man himself, in his activity, his frugality, his forward-thinking; in the
good and intelligent employment of his faculties, far more than those of others;
and finally that, if man owes his well-being somewhat to the laws, he owes it far
more to himself; moreover, one could say that to himself alone is he beholden,
for as much as the citizen is worth, so much is the law worth.

Is it not strange, gentlemen, that a truth so simple and so clear has cease¬
lessly needed to be restored, and that it seems so obscure in our times and
among our lights? Alas! It is easy to say the cause: mathematical truths for their

Speech Given to the Academy

25

demonstration require only observations and facts; but to grasp and believe mor¬
al truths it is necessary to have [good] mores.

The Academy asks of its contestants not a treatise but a manual, which is to
say that she invites them to make a work that is short, practical, and within the
reach of all; in fine, one which is written for the people, yet without the pretense
of reproducing the language of the people, a kind of affectation contrary to any
diffusion of the truth among the inferior classes that could be sought by a noble
( bel ) spirit. The importance that she attaches to this little book is manifested by
the prize of ten thousand francs she promises to him who shall be its author. But
she announces in advance that she will award this prize only if there emerges
from the contest a work that is remarkable and suited to fulfill the need she has
conceived.

I stop here, gentlemen; it is time to cede the floor to the permanent secre¬
tary, who is going to speak to us of one of our colleagues whose loss we regret
and whose memory we venerate, M. Droz. To praise his writings and retrace his
actions is neither to emerge from the circle of our studies nor to fail in our grand
mission; for honesty shows itself better by example than by precept, and the best
course in morals—and I beg the pardon of my colleagues in the section on phi¬
losophy—shall always be the life of a good man retraced by a historian who
understands and makes known the love of virtue.

Appendix

Our Academy, gentlemen, has this for her mission: to be the hearth and regula¬
tor of these necessary and fearsome sciences; this is her glory, but it is also her
peril.

Governments are generally indifferent enough to what happens in the bo¬
som of academies, and even, in ordinary times, in the world of ideas. When we
are occupied with nothing but literature, philosophy, science, and even with reli¬
gion, they willingly believe that these do not touch on anything else. But as soon
as we speak of politics in any of its parts, they become very attentive. They im¬
agine that we do not act upon politics except when we speak about it. Yet do not
believe, gentlemen, that this is merely the failing of those petty souls who gen¬
erally lead human affairs. The most noble (beaux) geniuses have fallen here.
There are philosophic or religious opinions that have changed the face of em¬
pires and that were bom beside the greatest men without their having taken any
notice. It is to be believed that if these same princes had heard their subjects
discussing a question of communal roads they would have been all eyes and
ears.

An academy of moral and political sciences is therefore not, it is necessary
to recognize, equally appropriate to every country and to every time. Her place
is hardly anywhere but in free countries and places where the discussion of eve-

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Alexis de Tocqueville

rything is permitted. These are conditions of existence with which we are hon¬
ored, gentlemen; let us not contest them.

The ancien regime, which treated the moral and political sciences like an
ingenious and respectable occupation of the human spirit, never permitted those
who cultivated them to unite in an academy. The revolutionary dictatorship,
which of all dictatorships is the greatest enemy of liberty, stifled these sciences,
and, as the sole efficacious means of preventing writings treating of them, sup¬
pressed as much as possible their authors: almost all that remained of the old
eighteenth century school, Bailly, Condorcet, Malesherbes, perished by its
hands. One may believe that the same fate would have befallen Montesquieu,
Voltaire, Turgot, and Rousseau himself, had they then lived. Happily for them,
they were dead before they could see the frightening times for which one holds
them responsible. But scarcely had the Terror ceased when the moral and politi¬
cal sciences immediately returned to great honor, and were, it must be said, the
object of an unjust preference: for in the creation of the Institute which then took
place, a separate division was made for them, while one was refused to belles-
lettres: strange ingratitude of a generation that literature had nourished and con¬
ducted into power!

The revolution continued on its course, but liberty soon returned to the rear,
for revolution and liberty arc two words it is necessary to hold carefully apart in
history. The First Consul—who personified and continued the French Revolu¬
tion in his own manner, but who was nothing less than the greatest adversary
liberty has yet encountered in the world—this First Consul did not delay in cast¬
ing a very evil eye upon (he Academy, or, as it was (hen called, the Division of
Moral and Political Sciences. The Academy was then composed, it is true, al¬
most exclusively of political men who had played various roles in the preceding
events. One counted there Cabanis. Daunou, Merlin de Douai, Dupont de Ne¬
mours, Cessac, Roederer, Sieyfcs, Talleyrand, l-ebrun (later Duke of Plaisance),
and Dcslutl-Traccy. She had for a foreign associate the illustrious Jefferson, then
president of the United States of America, which was no great title of recom¬
mendation with the First Magistrate of the Republic of France. Yet despite being
composed of famous persons, she tended only to make herself forgotten; seeing
the spirit of her master, which was no longer contained by the spirit of the limes,
she withdrew voluntarily into the obscurity of her own sphere; one sees this well
in perusing her final works.

In philosophic history, she was occupied with the government of France
under the first two dynasties; this did not seem bound to compromise her. None¬
theless, for more innocence yet, she believed it necessary to go back even to the
Pharaohs; one finds her employing her last meetings to listen to M. de Volncy,
who, according to the minutes, was charged with sharing interesting information
about the tunics of Egyptian mummies.

In morals, M. Dupont de Nemours read his articles on instinct, which, being
common to beast and man, could hardly disquiet the government.

In political economy, the Academy w r as occupied with the daily growth and
diminution of the Seine.

Speech Given lo the Academy

27

And in politics properly so-called, she was occupied with nothing.

The public treated the Academy a bit like it treated itself: she no longer at¬
tracted serious ideas from outside or acted upon them within her own bosom.
One sees nothing in her final minutes other than the title of a single work of
some length to which she paid homage: Course on Morals for the Use of Young
Ladies, by Citizen A1 marie.

None of this could appear fearsome, and yet the First Consul became preoc¬
cupied with her. The Academy had rendered herself very small, but the eye of
Napoleon perceived her despite the darkness into which she had cast herself.

When Napoleon had effaced the last vestiges of public liberty—or, as he pul
it, abolished government by lawyers—he wanted to close the last asylum of free
thinkers—or ideologues as he called them, forgetting that without these ideolo¬
gues, who had prepared the ruin of the ancien regime, and without these lawyers
who had consummated its ruin, he would never have become the master of
France and of Europe, but would doubtless have remained, despite his genius, an
obscure and petty gentleman, lost in the thousand inferior ranks of the hierarchy
they had destroyed.

1 have searched very attentively in many diverse documents, and notably in
the administrative documents deposited in the national archives, seeking just
how this destruction of the division on moral and political sciences took place; I
have found nothing worthy of consideration. By reading these documents one
sees only that it is not in parliamentary governments alone that those who lead
affairs give themselves the trouble of hiding their true thoughts in a multiplicity
of words. However all-powerful they proclaim themselves to be, despotic gov¬
ernments dispense no more than others with this ruse. They condescend at other
times to the use of deception. In the report of the minister of the interior, Chap-
tal, the report preceding the decree, a copy of which I found corrected by the
hand of the minister himself, not a single word is said on the reasons for sup¬
pressing the Division of Moral and Political Sciences. No critique, no insinua¬
tions against her: it is not even said that she is being suppressed; all that is con¬
templated is the reform of the Institute in accordance with a better plan and the
introduction within her of a division of labor more favorable to die interests of
letters and of the sciences. In reading the considerations behind this decree, it
seems that no thought has even been given to us. In reading the decree itself, one
perceives that we no longer exist, and that we have been killed gently through
omission.

I have searched very attentively in many diverse documents, and notably in
the administrative documents deposited in the national archives, seeking just
how this destruction of the division on moral and political sciences look place; I
have found nothing worthy of consideration. By reading these documents one
sees only that it is not in parliamentary governments alone that those who lead
affairs give themselves the trouble of hiding their true thoughts in a multiplicity
of words. However all-powerful they proclaim themselves to be, despotic gov¬
ernments dispense no more than others with this ruse. They condescend at other
limes to the use of deception. In the report of the minister of the interior, Chap-
tal, the report preceding the decree, a copy of which 1 found corrected by the
hand of the minister himself, not a single word is said on the reasons for sup¬
pressing the Division of Moral and Political Sciences. No critique, no insinua¬
tions against her; it is not even said that she is being suppressed; all that is con¬
templated is the reform of the Institute in accordance with a better plan and the
introduction within her of a division of labor more favorable to the interests of
letters and of the sciences. In reading the considerations behind this decree, it
seems that no thought has even been given to us. In reading the decree itself, one
perceives that we no longer exist, and that we have been killed gently through
omission.

Likewise, one secs in the report that the original idea of the minister was,
purely and simply, to return to the old academic organization, not only as to
things, but also as to names; in one word, to do in 1803 what Louis XVIII did in
1816: to re-fasten the chains of time, as he himself later said. The First Consul
accepted the thing, but rejected the words. M. de Fontanes, who remained very
much in love with the past, and who was, to use the modem jargon, a great reac¬
tionary, pressed him to give again to these sections the name Academy; we are

28 Alexis de Tocqueville

assured that he responded to him, “No! Not the Academy! That would be too
Bourbon!”

Thus ended the Division of Moral and Political Sciences. She was buried,
like all other public liberties, wrapped in the flag of Marengo. At least it was a
glorious shroud.

One does not see her reborn until the French once again become free.

Even in the most favorable times, the Academy is placed between two reefs.
She must equally fear going beyond her sphere and remaining inactive within it.

We ought never to forget, gentlemen, that we are a learned society and not a
political body: the security and the dignity of our labors depend upon it.

This line of demarcation between theory and practice is, one must admit,
easier to trace than to hold. A question that at first glance seems purely theoreti¬
cal can, in response to the passions of the moment, turn easily into a question of
facts and an instrument of parties; for we are a reasoning and noble-spirited (bel
esprit) people among whom one willingly makes the most subtle theories serve
for the satisfaction of the most coarse appetites, and often wraps rather villain¬
ous actions in the most noble (beaux) words. There are political matters that
naturally pertain to practice and others that are occasionally drawn toward it; the
Academy has known how to avoid, with a reserve that does her honor, both the
one and the other. She has held firm to the sphere of theory. She has done more:
she has striven to draw spirits there; if she has not always succeeded, there is no
need to be astonished.

One might believe that in a time when all men take part in governing, the
abstract science of government will be cultivated most and best. The contrary
would be closer to the truth. The greatest publicists who have appeared in the
world have preceded or followed ages of public liberty. Aristotle wrote of the
republic from the court of Alexander; The Spirit of the Laws and The Social
Contract were composed under absolute monarchy. These books have made
(fait) us what we are, but we would probably be incapable of making them to¬
day. Facts incessantly depart from ideas and practice from science, and politics
ends by being nothing but a game of chance: one in which the dice are loaded.

It is with the end of attracting toward speculative politics those spirits who
would be distracted by the clamor of parties and the care of affairs that the
Academy has established contests and distributed annual prizes to those writers
who distinguish themselves therein. To judge these contests, and distribute these
prizes, is the object that has united us today.

Notes

1. Previously published, in a translation by J. P. Mayer, as “The Art & Science of
Politics: An Unpublished Speech,” in Encounter 36:1 (January, 1971). The present trans¬
lation is based on the speech proper as presented in the first volume of Tocqueville’s
Oeuvres, Edition Pleade, A. Jardin (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 1215-1226; and on the Ap¬
pendix included in volume IX of Gustave de Beaumont’s edition of Tocqueville’s Oeu-

Speech Given to the Academy

29

vres (Paris: Michel-Levy Freres, 1866), 643-647. I have striven to render Tocqueville’s
French as literally as possible while employing English that is grammatically correct and
stylistically tolerable. Brian Danoff and Elena Hebert assisted me in improving this trans¬
lation; any remaining deficiencies are mine.

2. Here and throughout the text, “fact” translates the French “fait," which can mean
either “fact” or “act.” The latter meaning should not be dismissed, since the facts upon
which political science focuses concern the actions ( les actions) of men.

3. Here and elsewhere, the verb “form” is “ se faire," containing the root of “fait"
(see note 2 above). One of the actions of men—in their public or governing as well as
private capacity—is to theorize about human action; political science must therefore
study itself.

4. Tocqueville’s expression, “ avoir grand tort" is suggestive of both error and in¬
jury.

5. Tocqueville refers to the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the “Glo¬
rious” Revolution in England, and the July Revolution in France, respectively.

6. The word “form,” used twice in this paragraph, translates “ donnent la forme aux ”
and ‘ forment ,” respectively.

7. Here Tocqueville omitted to read a portion of his speech, which is reproduced in
the Appendix below. Four months earlier, Louis Napoleon had staged a successful coup
d'etat.

8. “It is a great beginner-again.”

9. “ L'ordre judiciaire" refers to courts in the normal order of procedure.